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Oliver Wiegner‘s photographs from ‘Entropy Definition No. 2’ explore suffering and its ubiquitous nature, how it arises in each of us, is rooted in the memories of our childhood and youth.

Like many artistic endeavours Wiegner’s project began with a walk, with a look back into his past to see, with new eyes, everything he had known, had a relationship with over the years. This quiet contemplation of places that bore influence on him became something altogether more important, were to be the cornerstone of ‘Entropy Definition No. 2’.

The further he looked into these pictures the more he saw, a darkness he couldn’t articulate, a shadow of what was, lingering, malevolently, over what is. And it’s this dichotomy between the memory of a place and its present reality that Wiegner seeks to explore – an inner journey into a past that only existed in his youthful imagination – places that live as perceptions in the mind; are always changing, never fixed, fluid and in perpetual movement; the past, present and future interchangeable, malleable in the space time continuum.

This realisation has given Wiegner the opportunity to create a series of photographs that represent both the personal and the universal, his pictures as relevant to him as they are to us, each image provoking questions without answers, each presenting a world that is constant flux, that is pregnant with tension and ambiguity. As he puts it himself:

We never truly are, but merely exist in an approximation in between our past experiences and those still to come.

This series is divided into three parts: the first section begins with a quote from a song by the American post-hardcore band, La Dispute and leads into childhood and playfulness, the definition of ‘entropy’ marks the opening of the second part which deals with the time span between youth and adulthood and the last part examines ‘metaxis’ and the feeling of imbalance and an in-between. Here’s what Wiegner has to say about his work:

I started working on the project by going to places that somehow had an influence on me and taking photos there. Looking at the resulting images I quickly realised that there is something more, a darkness I couldn’t really put my finger on. After putting some more thought into it, I decided that it would be far more interesting to not just keep the photographs ambiguous, but rather base the whole project on it. Given that the project works with memories of my childhood and youth, the uncertainty that lies within the photographs allows the viewer to search for their own interpretation or relate to certain emotions.